In part three of our exploration of polarity management with the world experts Beena Sharma and Barry Johnson, we dive deeper into the implications and applications for contemporary global issues and for understanding and mastering our own lives.

Welcome to Deep Self, Society, Spirit, Life enhancing, Paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.

Maybe Beena, this would be a way back into allowing you to add to your what you told us about development because I think you pointed to the fact that development emphasizes both. There are shifts in both content and process and you came to the process but you didn't talk about the content of what polarities emerge at different stages.

I had started doing that. So when we talked about at the very first stage there is this self interest. So that's the focus and you know, there's no capacity to really include the other and there's just intention and want and immediacy and there's no capacity to see the impact or to defer gratification or to even think ahead in time. Everything is like now and immediate. So that's like a couple of contents at the first stage. At the next stage then there is more emphasis on belonging and gaining approval and not enough of a sense of my own what do I want? I'm more interested in what you want of me. I'm more interested in what do you expect of me. And I want to be who you want me to be. But I don't haven't really found, I haven't separated myself. So there's wisdom in separation. Just a symbiotic dependence is not interdependence before you get from that symbiotic oneness. Rather, if that's the beginning, then you separate, you see the dependence, then you become independent, then you become interdependent and then the oneness that comes after that is a more mature oneness. So anyhow, so there is this symbiotic dependence. The other thing that's also at this stage of socialization is the interest in harmonizing. In harmonizing and not establishing, you know, a difference of opinion. So I really don't have a different opinion and I haven't found my voice. As I said, at the next stage I separate and I have now my own sense of identity. And there the automatic preferencing is of what I know and what I think should be done. And I am right and you are wrong and this is the way to do it. This is the right way to do it. And the other piece that comes also as A privileging is I am more important than us in a different way. So I'm. It's hard for me to collaborate. Then at the next level, I'm now able to open, you know, think about other people's, you know, different perspectives. And at this stage, in terms of content, I'm more interested in achieving, having goals and changing and measuring and improving things and making things happen. And what gets underprivileged or sometimes I can't even see it is being open to what is actually emerging, not just what I'm trying to do to the world, but what's actually naturally emerging. Pausing, learning from my mistakes, receiving feedback from the environment. And also, this is a milestone of return where it's not all out there. Everything is not objective. There is an interiority. So it's not about me changing the world as much as I am being changed. That's the other poll that comes online. And an openness to being influenced and openness to being changed. Sometimes there's a fear that if I don't control everything, if I don't make everything happen the way it should happen, then we're all in trouble.

It seems like there's a cycle going here. You have states and you have a polarity. Then it comes together and you have a new unity. Then you have a new polarity all the way up, you know, and all the way down.

Beautiful.

It's very, very beautiful. And I wanted to say something about what you said, Barry, about Richard Rohr. One time I was going through a very powerful transformational time, and somehow I got the book Everything Belongs. And it was just like, you know, it was just amazing. It was a godsend. And I think that's probably at the core of what we're talking about here, is everything belongs. And the process is to figure out how it belongs, how it fits together, how do these polarities come together to create something new? And it's very Hegelian. Hegel, with his. The way that he looked at things as having a thesis, antithesis, a synthesis, seems very similar to that. And I will leave it with that.

Yeah. Beena, did you complete the developmental process?

Yeah. No. So there are a couple more. Sorry. No, not at all. So once I become more open to different perspectives, then I start privileging that multiple perspectives. I need to understand everybody's story. And then I realize that, well, there are all these truths. There is no one truth, and it's not my truth. So then you privilege multiple perspectives and you can take a stand because you know how do you say that this is right and that's not right? Everything is right. So you privilege multiple perspectives over actually having some absolutes. And you also privilege inquiring and opening up to integrate different perspectives until you feel the limits of that. And then the next stage, then you synthesize. Then you synthesize and you integrate and you're more systemic. But then you can privilege the system over the individual. You're now more thinking about the overall system and the system within system. And sometimes you can miss paying attention to the part because you.

You've learned that it creates problems.

It creates problems. And you have to be able to also pay attention to the part, not just the whole. And because there's so much capacity and mastery at this stage, then mystery is not seen. In a way, it's like everything can be. I can do so much, and all of this needs to be included. But there's also something that's mysterious and invisible that is not seen. And then at the next stage, there is a recognition that all of this is meaning making. Everything that I'm thinking, like, even these absolutes that I thought, okay, everything is relative, but there are some absolutes. But these absolutes, they're also ideas, they're constructs, they're. And they're all stories that we tell. So then the polarity of stories constructing realities and then actually living it. So the map is not the territory. So the map and the territory then are seen sort of come together at that stage, living into it. And then the last stage, which is a unit of stages full of polarities and paradoxes, and all ambivalences are acknowledged and integrated and owned and seen as separate and seen together. And that's when non, dual, and dual also is seen as a dualism. I mean, because that's what language is making, that difference between dual and non, dual. So they go all the way up in so many more ways than I can explain in two or three minutes. But at least you have some, a couple of key ones at each stage. But when we look at each stage of development, we identify, you know, some eight to 20 polarities at each stage that not everybody will inhabit because they are abstractions, but they give us a window into that meaning making.

That's so beautiful. Veena, you just gave us a tour of human possibilities. That's just wonderful.

And I'm so grateful to Barry, so grateful to you for teaching me this lens. For me then to be able to use this lens to parse maturity, that's a gift to both the fields And I'm just very, very grateful.

Wonderful.

Yeah. One of the things I was tracking Veena as you were doing that. Wonderful. Description and description of the process is something that is true throughout this process of moving through. This is the reality that each of us is born unique and that we become more unique through our life. And the other is that we're born connected, and our awareness of being connected increases through our life. And our life is not about trying to become unique, because we already are. And so pursuit of wanting to be sort of more unique or whatever is. It's not necessary. We can let go of that. We don't have to try to be more unique, and we don't have to try to be connected. We are already connected. So there's no energy required for us to be both unique and connected. We just sort of appreciate the truth of that in different ways, you know, as we move through our own development.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

I don't want to finish our conversation before we look at applications to some of the great issues of our time, which you do in your book. And, Barry, maybe we could look at one thing which is very current now. You do a nice analysis of Trump supporters and Trump opposition, and that is such a divisive issue in our culture at the moment. You have to point a way that at least ideally could point us beyond this staring at each other. So could you maybe speak to that?

Yeah. Well, I think that having a polarity lens, when you find yourself in conflict with somebody, if you have some appreciation for polarities, the first question is, wait, we're in tension here. Might this tension be around a polarity or one or more key polarities? And if that is true, as Beena mentioned earlier, we might have two points of view where I'm seeing the upside of my value, and it's triggering my fear of the downside of this other's value. So, for example, if we're looking at immigration and I'm valuing the Statue of Liberty, send me your, you know, being welcoming. And some people are saying, well, that can be, you know, your notion of being welcoming, which you're so excited about, makes me anxious, because if we're welcoming without protecting the people who are already here, we're just welcoming people from outside of our group, if you will, welcoming them in without paying attention to its impact on those of us who are already here. That makes me frightened. And so the more welcoming you are, the more anxious I am about your being welcoming. On the other hand, if somebody is being protective and saying, well, I need to protect the people who are here, the more they talk about being protective and shipping people off to El Salvador's prison because they're supposedly involved in a gang. The more you are being defensive and protective, the more I'm concerned about your inability to see the humanity of the people who are wanting to come. Both of us have a point of view of value that they're holding on. One is protecting and the other was welcoming. And the question becomes from a polarity perspective, how can we be both welcoming and protecting? What does that look like? It's a different question than can I get more votes in order to make sure that we do the protecting for the people who are on the protection side anyway? That's one example of how that shows up. Another way that it shows up is I'm talking now. This has occurred recently since I've been working within this. I live in a retirement community, been here for eight years and there have been some of us who were part of protesting, part of the hands off demonstration and other residents who were opposed to us demonstrating out in front of our retirement community. And so there was this. How do we deal with this? You know, the tension within our own community here and the language that I'm using in this ongoing discussion, it's really quite current here, is the language of compassionate action. The combining of the freedom, you know, the freedom to speak, the freedom to demonstrate on the one hand to take action and to have that be modulated by, have it be impacted by compassion. And so the notion is that compassion is the source of the action in the first place. It's the why, why are we acting? Because we're concerned about the impact of various actions on people's retirement, on our grandchildren, in terms of climate change. So it's like it's coming out of a compassion for. We see harm being done. So it comes from compassion. And so the how is also informed by compassion. So how is the do we take the action? Why we take the action because we're concerned about things that are going on that people are being harmed, how we take the action. We need to be compassionate about the people who we are impacting with our action, including the people who would prefer we not take that action, including the people whose action we're even opposed to. So compassion needs to be a why and a how in order to keep us from being just self righteously cruel.

I would say what you were, you were saying about the immigration, which is a huge issue and it's affecting democracies all over the world. It's not just Our country.

Right.

And. And I, interestingly enough, have strong feelings on both sides. You know, I think people have a right to their culture and, you know, protect it. And I feel that's. That's okay, that's not sick. There's something good here. And then, of course, I lived a large part of my life in Latin America and I was, you know, dealing with middle class, you know, poor Indians, high, you know, I met them all and loved them all. So I don't know what the solution is, but I really recognize that polarity within myself, and I'm struggling with it because I don't think it's, you know, just, you know, seal our country and blah, blah, blah, or. Yeah, it's like, how do you respect what's good yet fix what's broken? And how does that come together?

Yeah. A good friend of mine, Michael Buchman from Germany, talked about the initial response to immigrants coming into Germany was extremely welcoming. I mean, it was extremely welcoming. And because they were so welcoming, people started going to Germany because that was a place where people were welcome. And so rather than other places where it would be harder, more difficult, they were housed. People were opening their houses for temporary housing for people. They were meeting them at the train station and designating which houses they could go to to stay temporarily. And that led to a flood, that led to a reaction where people saying, wait a minute, we are beyond capacity in this welcoming thing. And it fed the more that conservative, more right wing, Wait a minute, we're not protecting, you know, we're making ourselves vulnerable by how we're doing this. Matter of fact, we did a presentation a number of years ago of just about that whole issue in Germany where they had done something that was very much like our Statue of Liberty, you know, give me your poor, you're tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free. But it's a good example, like you said, of we experience it inside.

Barry, maybe follow on with that. Maybe do want to get in? Perhaps our final example, the biggest of all challenges, something that you've been working on Veena, and thinking about deeply, is the so called meta crisis. The recognition that the many challenges we're facing, whether it be environmental, ecological, weapons, war, degradation, pollution, all these are reflections of both our individual and collective psyches and our culture, and that they feed into one another in an extraordinarily complex, actually incomprehensibly complex big system. And I wonder what. This is one of the great challenges of our time, perhaps, you know, the challenge which will decide the future of civilization. It's a huge topic. But do you have a sense of how polarity thinking can help you?

Well first, even tracing the roots of the meta crisis and how it relates to either or thinking is important. So I'll just say a couple of things and then Barry, you know, I'd love to hear from you. So the first is I do think that unipolar thinking, or either or thinking is a generator function of the metacrisis. This is the core psychological imperative or impulse that has led to the metacrisis. And so if you just break it down. So earlier I talked about how if you have systematically you're privileging one pole over the other and there is a set of polarities where you're only privileging one, then they all stack and then you get compounding and more complex issues which has led to the meta crisis. So what are some of these? And they're quite obvious that they're not earth shakingly new framings. Focusing on the short term, not on the long term, focusing on the part, not on the whole. Focusing on linear, linear problem solving and not systemic. Focusing on external, what's external and not what's internal. Just you know, taking concrete external material solutions and not really thinking about culture or the human being, for example, focusing on the technical. So more technology, more problems, more technology. You're not focusing on the impact on humans. So now we have so much, you know, impact on mental illness as a result of over focusing on technology. Focusing on the individual and not the collective. Focusing on by part, I mean even some constituencies and their independence as opposed to collective and more equitable distribution. Focusing on what's traditional, like we make homes by cutting trees. What about innovative ways so that we can come up with new ways of making homes and we're not harming the environment. And then the last uber one would be focusing on anthropocentric human oriented as opposed to the non human or nature. But you just stack all this up and you get the meta crisis. You stack focusing on short term, linear, simple, external, technical, individual, economic and humans only. And you neglect, you neglect the whole, the longer term, the systemic, the human, the collective nature. This is what you get. So this is just a very high level, quick, I mean quite what is obvious. I think I'm just naming some of the obvious. And Daniel Schmachtenberg has summarized this beautifully in his description of what is naive progress. So naive progress is when you naively, you know, do this simplistic linear part, you know, part focused, short term focused, that's not mature progress. So maturity is about harmonizing the polarities. So, Barry, I'd be curious about how you would.

Yeah, I agree with everything you're saying, Beena. It's very helpful. Another way to look at how it's helpful is that we can look at natural desires that all of us have. And if we respond to those natural desires by choosing one pole of a polarity, we get in trouble. So the source of the problem is having a natural desire that is responded to by choosing one pole of a polarity. So for the first one, for example, is we have a natural desire to be problem solvers. If we've got a problem, then solving it, that, I mean, that's what we've been taught in school, is you gotta problem solve it. And so the desire to solve the problem tends to focus us on either or thinking and problem solving to favoring that relative to both and thinking and seeing how we might leverage polarities, leverage interdependence. You know, there's a problem here, let's solve it. So if we favor problem solving to the relative neglect of both and thinking now we bring that problem solving mindset to other things we want to do. So we sort of leave. You know, it's like we, we've chosen in that polarity, we've chosen the either or problem solving pole. And when we do that, and we bring that either or mindset to our desire to protect our loved ones, our family or our country, the underlying polarity that is that relates to protection is claiming power and sharing power. If we assume that, that the only way to protect ourselves is to claim power so that we can protect, you know, I will be so powerful that you will not harm those I care about, you will not harm my country, or you won't harm my family, my children, et cetera. So we end up concentrating power to protect ourself from other people abusing us by them having more power than us. So you get into the overfocus on claiming power to the neglect of sharing power, and it leads to an abuse of power and it leads to spending an inordinate amount of our budget on military power and protection. And so now you've combined this either or thinking, and you've got the claiming power without sharing power with this abuse of power. Another thing besides protecting is we want to provide for our family. So I want to provide for my kids, my children, I want to provide for them. I've already now see this as a problem to solve. And I have assumed a lot of power in order to protect, I use that power to also provide. And the underlying polarity here in wanting to provide is the erroneous assumption that I can't both. We can't as a society both have abundance for some in material things like water, food, shelter, safety, education, healthcare. We can't have both abundance for some and basics for all. The assumption is if we try to give basics for all, I'm going to have to give up the potential for abundance. If we provide basic housing for everyone, I'm going to have to give up one of my three houses. The assumption that we can't have both undermines our ability as a group to actually look at how we might provide basic housing for everybody or basic health care for everybody. The assumption is that I'm going to lose the benefit of some abundance. We can't have, you know, high quality healthcare and basic healthcare for everyone. So that choice, notice how these are cascading and combining. And the final dimension that I think is in my sort of stack I write about here is the desire to belong. And when I want to belong, the way that we belong in any society, whether it's a faith community or a state community, is we belong by obeying the rules of that culture, that society. And so it's all about complying with the rules. And then we get into the justice and mercy polarity where we over focus on justice to the neglect of mercy. And so we end up not being able to own our own shortcomings. Whatever the rules are, if we break the rules, we can't own up to that. And if we can't own up to it because there's no mercy, if we've got justice without mercy, then I end up lying and projecting anything I can't own onto other people. And I find a group upon whom to project what I can't own. And the two criteria for those who I would project on is they have to be available and they have to be a not me or not us. So if you think about it, if you're a white male with a lot of power, what groups are the not me upon whom you could project shit you can't own? That would be women and people of color. And so racism and sexism just evolves right out of that stack. So if you think about the original thing we're talking about is wanting to be a problem solver, wanting to protect, wanting to provide and wanting to belong. All of those are things that are absolutely not evil. They are great and understandable if we use the underlying polarities related to them. And end up choosing one pole to the neglect of the other. Then we create poverty, racism, sexism, and war. And the source are some very desirable things that all of us would claim are good things. Doesn't have to be an evil source for us to perpetuate those items.

But I think I have a question before. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

No, long enough. I talk plenty. Go ahead.

So, Beena, you were talking about the metacrisis. Okay. All these things stack up. And this morning I was going through a meta crisis. I've been ill for about two weeks, and I had to talk to Roger whether I should be on this, the podcast, and my dog needs to go to the vet. The. It seems that our constitutional democracy is being destroyed as we sit here and, you know, my health at the same time. So all of these. I do a podcast, but the country's going down the tubes, you know, and my dear dog needs to get to the vet, you know, and I gotta get well, you know what? How do I put this all together? How do you. How do you. These multiple polarities that present themselves, how do you select?

How did you select to be here?

Talked to Roger and he said, okay, he said, soldier through, something like that. And I feel very committed to this podcast, and I feel very committed to Roger and our team. So that's what I did, you know.

And it doesn't mean you don't care about the dog or you don't care about the democracy and that you come up with some action to take care of that. And so we all find our ways to integrate, as long as you're keeping that in mind. But there are some people who wouldn't even have the other option, who wouldn't even think of a competing thing. They would just pick the one thing. But so how do we do it? I don't know. That's an integrating question for every person in the moment. And to the degree with which we have the capability and the capacity to see these tensions, to recognize that they need to be harmonized, and then to practice what it feels like to do both, to be both, to the degree with which we've built that muscle, then right action will flow through us.

The more that we work with it, this process, this mechanism, the easier it comes to get through it and reach that point of everything belongs. And how do we sort that out and put it together?

Yeah, it will become an unconscious competence, but we have to consciously become more competent, which is why I'm so interested in teaching this. I think it's something we can build, we can all learn. I'm way better at working with polarities today than I was 10 years ago. And to that extent, I might be more masterful in the world.

So that's a very hopeful note that to some extent at least, this is a. In addition to being a developmental process is a skill that we can learn. And to coin the phrase, there's both and there's a develop. Both development and information are important here. And Barry, you've done just a beautiful job in giving us some information, ideas, inspiration about this whole theme of polarities. And I think we all thank you very much for your lifetime's work here. Enormous contribution. And Beena, we thank you for your pioneering work in mapping out stages of adult development. This is to my mind, as I've said a number of times, one of the most exciting areas of contemporary psychology. So having you both together and illuminating both aspects of our ways of thinking is just, I think this is a priceless gift. So deep gratitude to you both and been a light.

I just have one thing I want to say as a part of ending, and that is Beena's point about learning over time. It's also true that we need to be loving and forgiving of ourselves when we discover that we have. My wife, Dana, reminds me on a regular basis of my inability to effectively leverage the polarity of work and home. And I get so enthralled with wanting to be on podcasts like this that I. I do not take adequate time for myself to just be and be with Dana and with the family. And so the tension is always there, you know, within any polarity. And sometimes we just find ourselves having indulged one poll more than we would have upon reflection, that we have really not done a very good job of leveraging some key polarities and to just let ourselves, let that be a part of our reality, you know, and so a little bit of forgiveness for ourselves and others can help in these times, in all times.

Yes, indeed so. And I just want to once again mention your books, Polarity Management and your more recent one titled and Making a Difference by Leveraging Polarity, Paradox or Dilemma. So thank you very much and Beena, thank you. And Beena's work is available through veda, the Vertical Development Academy, wonderful webinars, seminars and ways of measuring our own development. So thank you both. It's been an extraordinary, rich dialogue and thank you both for your contributions.

Thank you both for inviting.

Thanks for having us. Yeah, appreciate it.

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